As an industry we look to open source communities as our core innovation engine. At Red Hat we’re always monitoring, participating in, and even creating these open source communities. Here’s how you can garner some insight into where the industry, and Red Hat, might be going next.
It was not that long ago when organizations had in-house servers humming along running applications and storing data. Today, the opportunity afforded by containers means that applications can now live on a cloud platform (either public or private), or one of several available cloud platforms.
But while applications and microservices housed in stateless containers are easy to move from place to place (indeed, that’s a big part of the appeal of containers), the data the applications are accessing are stateful and very, very difficult to relocate while still maintaining consistency, latency, and throughput. This is one of the challenges faced by the Red Hat Storage team, and addressed by Sage Weil in his recent presentation at Red Hat Summit: maintaining data availability with acceptable latency when working with applications in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
When we look to the future of applications and platforms, we need to keep an eye on the solutions of the past.
That is one of the main theses of Stephanos Bacon, Sr. Director of Portfolio Strategy at Red Hat, in this video from Red Hat Summit 2018, “Clouds Today, Serverless Tomorrow: Your Future Apps and Platforms”:
In order to understand the present situation around the many choices of languages and platforms a developer faces, Stephanos briefly walks through a 25 year year journey of enterprise software development. This journey is one of a “continuous-though-forward-moving cycle”.
This cycle looks back at itself to learn and adapt from the past while moving forward in response to changing market imperatives. While we may need new solutions, we also reach back in time to find seemingly old solutions that address new classes of problems.
In Part 1 of Now + Next’s closer look at the future of container storage, we examined the beginnings of the storage solution with a look at how hardware trends will affect the way storage and containers will evolve together.
In this installment, Ceph Project Lead Sage Weil continues our conversation, moving “up” the stack to software platforms. Specifically, Sage discusses where container technology is now and where it is going.
In this video, Director of Product Management for Developer Tools Brad Micklea talks through ten trends Red Hat is investing in that are already reshaping the developer experience.
The idea of software development as a major creative source for innovation has emerged in recent decades. During most of that time for the people writing code and running it in production, instead of being deep in the act of painting a masterpiece, they have had to spend too much time building and cleaning brushes.
The rise of container technology has created a new challenge for the storage industry. Within containers, applications, and computation resources are now incredibly mobile, while storage still has to remain persistent and accessible. Here’s how Red Hat is working to address the storage needs of container workloads.
In modern microservice-based architectures, each container is a transient object. It might live on one server for a while and then get moved over to another if directed by an orchestrator tool. While a container keeps its bundle of application software and dependencies during its lifecycle, it usually does not keep application data within the container. Nor should it. After all, in this model a container is designed to run only what is needed and when it is needed. When done, the container is allowed (in fact encouraged) to disappear. If an application’s data were held inside that same application container, too, then pfft!
That’s a challenge.
In this video from Red Hat Summit 2018, Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Chris Wright gives a view into the future direction of Red Hat technologies.
The Superfluidity Project was a 33-month European (H2020) research project (July 2015–April 2018) aimed at achieving superfluidity on the Internet: the capability to instantiate services on-the-fly, run them anywhere in the network (core, aggregation, edge), and shift them transparently to different locations. The project especially focused on 5G networks and tried to go one step further into the virtualization and orchestration of different network elements, including radio and network processing components, such as BBUs, EPCs, P-GW, S-GW, PCRF, MME, load balancers, SDN controllers, and others.
For more information about it, you can visit both the official project website, as well as my previous blog post.
The wonders of automation have been thoroughly enjoyed by sysadmins in recent years with tools like Ansible enabling rapid deployment of applications and services across servers and cloud-based platforms. But as the IT world evolves to more container-based technologies, tools like Ansible have not translated well to orchestration-level actions.
This is changing rapidly, thanks to the new Automation Broker project. Part of the OpenShift ecosystem, Automation Broker connects the gap between provisioning servers and provisioning containers.
At the first signs of Spring, all Red Hatters turn at least one eye toward Red Hat Summit. Over the years, we’ve had many conversations with attendees about what kind of information and perspectives they’d like to hear at Summit. We learned that attendees appreciated the actionable technical information they received, but that they were interested in getting some insight into Red Hat’s point of view on emerging technology trends and their thoughts on the future. That was the motivation behind a new set of sessions from the Office of the CTO that we’re very excited to announce.
